Thrilled with the chance to go flying again, I found my flight gear in the basement, grabbed my aviation headset, kissed my wife and kids good night, and hurried off to the airport to meet my friend.

As I would be a front-seat passenger on the flight, I intended to observe the goings-on and effectively get a reintroduction to the world of GA that I had missed over the last few years. From previous articles, you may recall that I am a vocal proponent for the use of home flight simulation, a believer that the benefits of a modest setup can engage the user in aviation decision-making, learning, and fun. However, having not flown a real-world flight in four years, it felt like sufficient time had passed where I could be reminded and maybe surprised about some facets of the experience I had forgotten.

• READ MORE: To Providence or Bust, in Simulated Flight

Driving to the Airport

I did not expect to enjoy it, but the drive to the airport provided some post-workday decompression and reflection time. I’d be joining my friend at Plymouth Municipal Airport (KPYM), located 30 miles south of Boston on Massachusetts’ southeastern coast. Usually, the 90-plus-minute drive from my home to the airport would be arduous and traffic-filled, but the relatively late departure gave me an unusually stress-free drive. It felt great to have my flight gear on the seat next to me again, a little stiff and dusty from lack of use, but ready to go.

I used some of the windshield time to think ahead about where I could try and be a helpful addition to the flight. Pulling off the highway to stop for fuel, I opened ForeFlight to check the weather. Clicking on the “Imagery” tab, I reviewed the “CONUS Weather” section and then read the Boston and New York area TAFs and METARs.

Although my friend had already reviewed the weather, it helped to get my head back in the game. Before arriving at the airport, I took some time to recall some favorite flights when I was PIC, flying friends and family on short flights around New England. Flipping through those memories in my logbook, I realized this would be my first flight since my grandfather passed back in December 2020.

As was our tradition in his final years, I would write him a complete account of every flight so he could enjoy it vicariously. It was a small token of my appreciation for the gift of heavily subsidized flight training he and my grandmother had provided me when I was in high school. I am fortunate he lived a long life in which he shared flying memories, such as taking the F4U Corsair on training flights in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Arriving at the airport, I had a few minutes to myself after parking at the hangar. Walking out to the airport fence, just as the sun sunk below the tree line, I reached into my jacket pocket to find a special artifact. I closed my hand around my grandfather’s pair of U.S. Navy wings he gave me for safekeeping. I looked out over the quiet evening of airplanes at rest in their tiedowns, a little bit of haze on the horizon lit up the sky in orange and dark pink. It was calm and peaceful, and I had forgotten how moving this scene could be at golden hour. In a few minutes, I would be on the fun side of the fence, getting to fly with a good friend in a gorgeous airplane on a near-perfect VFR evening.

The Preflight

Within a few minutes, my friend arrived, and I was trailing him through the ritual of the preflight and being reminded of how much I used to enjoy the process. Per the checklist, we started at the back of the leftwing, examining the aileron, flaps, and the assorted hardware. As we worked our way through the checklist to the right wing, I placed my hand on the leading edge and realized how much I missed the tactile connection with the airplane prior to flying it. The aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and X-Plane 12 are faithfully digital replicas, down to the finest visual details, but there was joy again in physically prepping the machine that would soon take us aloft. Following my friend, I contorted myself below the wing. Assuming a push-up position next to the right tire, he showed me how to check the brake condition and then used the fuel strainer to sump the fuel. Then, we checked the oil, engine cowl, propeller, and the rest of the checklist items.

Satisfied the aircraft was ready to fly, my friend offered me the left seat for the evening. Soon we were taxiing ahead into the calm darkness of the night. No other aircraft were moving at KPYM and the unicom frequency was quiet, save for our radio calls.

Takeoff was exciting. The vibration of the engine at full throttle and acceleration into the climb were physical sensations I definitely missed from my previous years of flight simulation. To address this, I recently added an HF8 Haptic Gaming Pad by Next Level Racing to my home flight sim. The pad sits on top of your flight sim seat and is used across the gaming and simulation world to bring additional sensation to your in-sim experience. Using tunable vibrations within eight different locations on the pad, it cleverly alerts the user to physical changes occurring to the airplane in different phases of flight.

For example, flying my Cape Air-liveried Beechcraft 58 Baron in MSFS2020, there is a satisfying thump felt in the seat pad when the landing gear fully retracts into the fuselage and the doors close. It reminded me of when the gear doors closed in the Piper Arrow I flew a few years ago. The pad also activates when the flaps are lowered into the slipstream and when the aircraft engines are idling below 1,000 rpm. Also, the pad vibrates when rapid pitch changes occur, alerting you to the buildup of G-forces. Without a haptic pad, the dynamic changes to the airplane during flight could only be experienced visually or audibly, leaving out the rest of the body.

Night VFR

Back in the real world, we were cruising through night VFR conditions that couldn’t have been much better. The first major landmark below us was the yellow-lighted outline of the Newport Bridge in Rhode Island, pointing like an arrow due west toward the Connecticut coastline. From the air, we followed the glowing path of vehicle headlights traveling on Interstate Highway 95 South. The lights from cars, neighborhoods, and nearby towns flowed forward, ahead of the airplane, all the way to Manhattan, just barely visible on the horizon. We crossed over Westerly, and my friend confirmed that a small patch of lights off the left wing was Montauk on the most easterly tip of Long Island. Between us and that thin sliver of land were the waters of Long Island Sound, which seemed to reflect almost no light and were the deepest black, exactly like the night sky above. Looking beyond Montauk, the only lights were a few stars and distant airliners making their way to and from the New York City airspace.

Next, we flew over the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and were soon turning back toward KPYM, picking up Boston Approach on com 1 and passing over the Class Charlie airspace of nearby Providence, Rhode Island (KPVD). Twelve miles west of KPYM, we started looking for the airport, leaning forward in our belts and peering out into the murky darkness ahead. With only a crescent moon above us, there was just enough haze to make it slightly challenging to find the horizon. The Cirrus SR20’s MFD indicated exactly where the airport should be, so my friend dialed up the correct frequency, hit the push-to-talk switch seven times, and a dazzling blue jewel, made up of hundreds of individual airport lights, burst from the darkness, giving shape to the airport a few miles ahead. Looking out over the nose, I watched how the perspective of the runway changed as we descended to the touchdown point.

Comparing both the real-world landing with some recent night landings from the left seat in my sim, I was very impressed by MSFS2020’s faithful digital representation of that critical phase of flight. On your own home simulator, you can easily adjust and tune your field of view to work best for your specific monitor and hardware setup. A majority of the work can be done through simple adjustments of the slider bars. Tuning the field-of-view and camera settings in your simis time well spent since being able to look around your virtual cockpit easily is critical to improving immersion and having an enjoyable experience.

After landing, we taxied back, shut down, and began the postflight activities of putting the aircraft back in the hangar for the evening. I was grateful for my friend’s invitation to join him and the subsequent reintroduction to GA and night VFR flying. All of my flight sim experiences at home are solo, except for the live communication with volunteer controllers, and a highlight of this flight was getting to catch up with my friend in person. It was all the more special knowing his departure to airline training would be coming this summer, making opportunities to fly together more scarce. After four years away from GA, I realized how much of the flight experience I had missed, both the familiar and unexpected. But being back at the airport, I felt like I was home again—and it felt great.

Hardware Recommendations

Gaming PC: This article was written during my switchover to a new Doghouse Systems gaming PC. John Pryor, Doghouse Systems owner and founder, specifically built the PC to tackle the graphic demands of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, significantly shortening the load time and allowing its highest graphics settings to be utilized. I have been busy tuning the graphics and switching over the flight controls and avionics. Having been an X-Plane user since 2015, I am learning the finer points of MSFS2020. If you’re in the market for a home flight simulator, look at Doghouse Systems custom-built gaming PCs.

HF8 Haptic Gaming Pad: I am really enjoying the recent addition of this upgrade to my flight sim seat. After installing the driver required to make it run with MSFS2020, I plan to use it on every flight. Even a Class D level simulator can’t replace the physical sensations of flying, but that isn’t the point of the pad. When I add new hardware to my sim, I do so hoping it will provide incremental improvements in the form of additional fun, greater immersion, or a new challenge—and the sensor pad checks those boxes.

This article first appeared in the August 2023/Issue 940 print edition of FLYING.

The post A Midsummer Night’s Flight appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The purpose of having personal limitations is to mitigate risk. Personal limitations are predicated on pilot experience level, familiarity with the airplane, knowledge of the area, the weather, and the nature of the mission. They cover much more than just weather considerations.

IMSAFE and PAVE

As a student pilot, you learned about the “Swiss cheese model” that results in accidents. When all the risks line up—the holes in the cheese—accidents happen. The FAA has provided pilots with checklist tools (IMSAFE and PAVE) to help identify and assess risk before each flight.

IMSAFE guides the pilot to check if they are affected by illness, medication, stress, alcohol, fatigue, and/or emotion and eating. PAVE prompts the pilot to consider: pilot currency/skills, airplane condition, en-Vironment (includes weather), and external pressures.

If anything pops up for you when you run through either checklist, identify the risks, and ask yourself if they can be safely mitigated.

Not feeling well? Fatigued? Emotionally distracted? Reschedule the flight.

Is the No. 1 VOR in the aircraft in need of a VOR check? Do you need it for the flight? If the answer is yes, could you take care of it?

How is the weather? Will it be a challenge? Could you reschedule for later in the day after the weather improves?

Proficiency and Currency

One of the first things an aviator learns is that there is a big difference between FAA-defined currency and pilot proficiency. Often it’s the lack of proficiency that gets pilots into trouble—sometimes when they have non-pilot passengers on board.

Although three takeoffs and landings within 90 days make you current according to FAA regulations, you may want to impose a personal limit, such as, “I will not fly with passengers or in marginal VFR unless I’ve flown within the preceding two weeks,” or “If it’s been more than 60 days, I will remain in the pattern for X number of touch and gos before I depart the area.”

• READ MORE: Researcher Expects Boom in Aviation Weather Forecasting

Personal weather limitations can be the most challenging for the newly-minted VFR-only pilot, and you may want to adjust them for passengers. For example, you might set yours as the following: “I can fly when the ceiling is at least 1,000 feet and visibility is at least three miles; but if I have a passenger, I will not fly unless the ceiling is at least 1,500 feet and visibility is at least four miles.”

Most pilots take great pride in their skills, and some go so far as to write down a commitment to maintaining proficiency and currency, noting, “I will make an effort to fly at least three times a month, for at least two hours.” This is followed by a plan to remedy the situation if they cannot keep the commitment, such as “If it has been more than 45 days since I have flown, I will take a qualified instructor with me.”

Many FBOs have a policy like this written into their rental agreements. For example, some require that if you have not flown one of their aircraft in the preceding 90 days, you must fly with an instructor.

SCENARIO 1: WHEN THE WEATHER IS BELOW YOUR PERSONAL WEATHER LIMITATIONS

THE WEATHER IS MARGINAL VFR and it is late afternoon. You’re a VFR pilot on day 86 of the 90-day currency cycle, so you rush out to the airport to get in three takeoffs and landings. In two days’ time you have promised to take your boss’s kid for a flight. You have a little more than an hour before sunset, and you are not night current. The winds are calm. As you turn on to downwind, you notice fog is starting to appear about three miles off the departure end of the runway. What are your options?

• You could rush to try to get those three takeoffs and landings in before the fog gets worse.
• You could make a full-stop landing and finish your currency flying tomorrow.

In the time it took you to read that last sentence, you probably identified the risks: a rushed and rusty pilot rushing the pattern leads to a rushed landing, and those elements can put you behind the airplane.

What would you do? You know from training and experience that three touch-and-gos usually take about a half an hour to complete. In theory, there’s time to get them all done. Do you feel confident in your ability to safely finish the currency flight, or would you feel better trying tomorrow? What is the worst that could happen? Is this flight worth the risk?

Higher Workload? Increase Limits

Flying in an unfamiliar airplane is like cooking in someone else’s kitchen—it can be disastrous if you don’t know where everything is or how it works. When you are flying a new-to-you airplane, raise your minimums. Even if you are instrument rated, you may want to keep the first flight in a new-to-you airplane in VFR conditions, especially when you are learning the panel or avionics suite. If the purpose of the flight is transition training to a faster or more complex aircraft, you may want to stay in VFR conditions so you don’t unnecessarily add to your workload and increase the learning curve.

Limits for Passenger Flights

You may not have any qualms about a few bumps or gusty crosswinds, but your passengers could have other ideas. Both can be terror- and vomit-inducing for the aviation challenged.

If you’re an instructor and you conduct an introductory or primary training flight, you probably have limitations set by the school or FBO (or their insurance company). You also have to ask yourself, “Would I want the learner to fly in this by him or herself?” It is up to instructors to model good risk management. There’s a time and place for challenging weather—but you want them to learn, not be intimidated.

Unfamiliar Terrain

If you are unfamiliar with the area you are flying in, raise the weather limitations—this is the enVironment part of PAVE. If you are a “flat-land” pilot and your normal VFR limitations are three miles visibility and a 1,000-foot ceiling, but you’re flying in mountainous regions, raise those limitations to five miles visibility and a 2,500-foot ceiling—especially if up until then you have only read about mountain flying.

If it is a new-to-you area, study the sectional chart ahead of time, in particular noting the VFR reporting points, visual landmarks, and pattern altitudes. You do not want to be heads down with the iPad or sectional while approaching the pattern to land. You should also seek out mountain-specific instruction from an experienced pilot before you go it alone over high-altitude and mountainous terrain for the first time.

SCENARIO 2: RENTING AN AIRCRAFT WHILE ON VACATION 

KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS in check if you want to rent an airplane while on vacation. It is not like renting a car where you show your driver’s license, give them a credit card, and off you go. Most FBOs will want to see your pilot and medical certificates, give you an open-book test, and then have you do a flight with one of their CFIs before they rent to you. The checkout can run the better part of two hours. Know this before you go into the situation so you don’t feel pressured to cut corners to “get it done.”

One of the challenging aspects of this situation is that you probably don’t know anything about the FBO’s maintenance. You can, however, ask to see the airplane’s logbooks. Pay attention to the details. If the FBO smells like a fish tank or an ashtray, the CFI you are supposed to fly with shows up in dirty jeans and a T-shirt, and the aircraft looks about as rough as it can be, ask yourself if you really want to fly there. Even if they claim to be the “only game in town,” ask yourself if it’s worth the risk.

Remember, it just takes two holes to line up in the Swiss cheese to give you a bad day.

Avoid ‘Get-It-Done-Itis’

“Get-it-done-itis”—the close cousin to the deadly “get-there-itis”—can trigger poor decision making. Just about every airport has a story about a VFR-only pilot in a VFR-only airplane who did a scud run in his personal aircraft to get to the airport for a walk-in flight review.

In one example: It was the end of the month and the pilot insisted that it had to be done today, because the aircraft was going in for annual and it had been 23 calendar months since his last flight review. The pilot flew in from his grass strip about five miles from the airport. His assessment of the weather was, “it looked pretty good,” but after some questioning from the CFI, he admitted he had made the flight at 500 feet agl to avoid the clouds. He estimated the inflight visibility to be about two miles. He told the CFI that normally he would not fly unless he had at least a 1,000-foot ceiling and three miles visibility, but he “really, really, really needed to get this done.”

The CFI asked the pilot about his personal weather limitations. Was he comfortable during the flight? Would he have brought a passenger with him? The answer was “no” to both questions—settling the matter—that in making the flight, he broke his own parameters.

SCENARIO 3: THUNDERSTORMS: HOW CLOSE DO YOU GO? 

ANOTHER TYPE OF WEATHER limitation strikes when thunderstorms boil up in the region in which you plan to fly. Most pilots have heard a common safety rule: Stay clear of any storm by at least 20 nm. If storms fall in a line, passing through that line then requires you to have a 40 nm gap between cells in order to make a safe transit.

This is probably one of the most readily “busted” weather limits out there, as pilots commonly fudge that distance by half. They get away with it—for a while.

And then, inevitably, they find there’s a good reason for the safety margin. That’s because cells often generate severe turbulence and toss out precipitation far from their primary visible cloud formations.

This is one personal limit you don’t want to bust.

This article was first published in the Q2 2022 edition of FLYING Magazine.

The post Personal Weather Minimums: Identify Yours appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“When I taxied up and shut down the engine,” he said, “a warm feeling filled my whole body. And I realized that it was the feeling that this was the last time I would fly that airplane, and it hadn’t killed me.”

Scud running, flying VFR under low clouds and with limited visibility, is one of the most dangerous and ill-advised things a pilot can do. Despite being counseled against it, however, many—perhaps even most—new pilots find themselves scud running at some point. The lucky ones get a scare and start working on an instrument rating. The unlucky ones—well, results may vary.

The Journey Begins

A pilot, 69, and his wife set out from California in a Mooney M20K, bound for the pilot’s home field of West Houston Airport (KIWS) in Texas. When they descended to refuel at Bullhead City, Arizona, they got a low-battery warning; but after fueling, the engine restarted easily, the voltage indication was normal, and they decided to continue.

It was dark when they reached El Paso, Texas, and on final approach, the instrument-panel lights went out, along with the Garmin GPS. With the help of flashlights, they landed uneventfully. Over dinner, they discussed the problem. They thought it most likely alternator trouble and decided that the wife should continue to Houston on a commercial flight; she had to be at work, and the pilot “did not want her to go down [with him] if something went wrong.” Most of the time, there is nothing premonitory about those macabre pilot jokes.

The pilot left El Paso at 12:50 p.m. the next day. He had obtained a Leidos weather briefing an hour earlier: VFR was not recommended in Central Texas, and in East Texas, there were thunderstorms and moderate to heavy rain. In Houston, however, there was no rain. The briefer advised the pilot to check the Houston weather for updates while en route, but there is no record he did so.

He cruised at 9,500 feet, enjoying a 20-knot tailwind. Whatever impediments to visibility there may have been in Central Texas, he flew either over or around them. As he approached Houston, however, a layer of cumuliform clouds was moving across the area. The bigger buildups lay to the south and east, over the Gulf, but the northern edge of the clouds just overlapped the final miles of the pilot’s flight. Houston Executive, 9 miles west of KIWS, was reporting 1,000 overcast, 4 miles in light rain; 20 minutes later, the ceiling was down to 900 feet and visibility at 2.5 miles.

There was no shortage of airports with better weather west and north of Houston. Unlike pilots who have flown for a long time into gradually worsening weather, the Mooney pilot knew there were better conditions nearby. Furthermore, he was familiar with the area; he must have known plenty of places where he could land and leave the airplane until the weather at KIWS improved.

Nevertheless, he continued toward West Houston Airport.

What Happened

He passed midfield over Houston Executive at 2,775 feet msl. He was still above the clouds, but he must have been either able to recognize landmarks through gaps or tracking his progress on the GPS, because immediately after crossing Executive, he turned right 90 degrees, flew south a couple of miles, and then turned eastward about a mile south of Interstate 10. He continued generally eastward, with deviations left and right, for around 8 miles, then turned northward and began to descend.

He was not in radio contact with any ground facility. His route was that of a VFR pilot who might habitually approach West Houston by keeping the interstate on his left until he passes the four-lane Highway 99 and Fry Road, which runs north to south a mile east. These were unmistakable landmarks—or so it seemed.

At some point, the Mooney got under the clouds. Witnesses reported seeing a low-flying airplane going northwestward. As it began a descending right turn, a wing clipped power lines, the airplane pitched up, then nosed over and crashed in a field about 4 miles northwest of its destination.

• READ MORE: Peter Garrison Archive

The pilot’s wife told accident investigators that her husband, who had 250 hours total time, was careful to avoid bad weather, and that they had remained in California several days longer than planned while waiting for the outlook for their return flight to improve. This fact, which seems so incompatible with the way events unfolded, actually highlights the psychological power of a destination tantalizingly close at hand.

We have all experienced that irrational impulse called “get-home-itis.” It is the insidious demon that persuades pilots that a fuel gauge saying empty doesn’t really mean it, that worsening visibility will soon improve, and that the rough-running engine will be OK for another 20 miles. It is perhaps especially difficult to accept, at the end of a textbook VFR flight with a good tailwind, that a few inconvenient wisps of water vapor are going to ruin the day. Hangar, dinner, bed—how sweet they seem.

Scud running into unfamiliar terrain is scary, but close to home, you may feel that you will always be able to find your way. But perhaps that very familiarity of the area was the thing that ensnared the Mooney pilot. He knew perfectly well how to get to West Houston. But when you’re just a few hundred feet above the ground, the usual landmarks look different. He may have mistaken Fry Road for Highway 6, a mile or so farther along, which passes just east of KIWS. To compound his perplexities, all this was taking place inside the 30 nm veil of Houston Class Bravo, right under the baleful and all-seeing eye of ATC radar. If he got lost and ended up having to ask for help, he would be in legal trouble. But he was heading north, and it looked brighter there. Besides, he had to be near the airport. It must be just ahead.

It wasn’t.

Exactly why the flight ended as it did, we can’t tell. Why did the pilot get low enough to hit power lines? Could he have been distracted by an electrical problem like those that had plagued the previous flights? Did the GPS go out again, at the worst possible moment? Impossible to know. But one thing is pretty certain: If he had stayed in VMC, his casual joke about going down would have remained a joke and soon been forgotten.

Inconsequential Decisions

This accident illustrates a phenomenon for which psychologists, economists and social scientists probably have a name. I will call it the “momentum of inconsequential decisions.” The decision to fly to a certain location at a certain time may be arbitrary; you could go at a different time or to a different place—or not go at all. Plans can be changed with a text or phone call. By and large, people accept the judgment of the pilot.

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But once you are airborne and en route, the initial decision gains mass and momentum from the mere fact of its having been set in motion.

In June 2019, the non-instrument-rated owner of an A36 Bonanza offered to take a friend on a trip of several hundred miles, in order to consider a job offer. She was hesitant, but he encouraged her. They encountered weather along the way. What began as a reluctantly accepted friendly favor became that nebulous juggernaut: a commitment to be kept. The pilot did not turn back. Instead, he flew a more and more sinuous path at lower and lower altitude. You know the rest.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on the NTSB reports of these accidents and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention.

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of FLYING.

The post A Pilot Goes One Airport Too Far appeared first on FLYING Magazine.